


Voices Carry

by ClaraxBarton



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Anal Sex, Bucky Barnes Recovering, M/M, Oral Sex, Pining, Rimming, Self-Esteem Issues, Time Travel, winterhawk - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:22:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23219206
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraxBarton/pseuds/ClaraxBarton
Summary: But Coulson was real, was alive, and he had a job for Clint.A job that Natasha had turned down, Clint found out later, by actually laughing in Coulson’s face and tossing her hair and walking away.A job that Hill also turned down, with less laughter and more swagger and probably more judgemental eyebrows. Then again, maybe not. Both women were disturbingly competent in conveying their utterly devastatingly low opinions of others with just an arched eyebrow.But Clint hadn’t known that at the time. Still, even if he had, Clint wasn’t…He probably still would have said yes.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 41
Kudos: 373





	Voices Carry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flowerparrish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/gifts).



> Now beta read by the amazing Ro!

Not that it mattered - because no one  _ asked him _ \- but Clint hadn’t slept with Bucky Barnes on purpose. It had been, as much as that kind of thing could be, an accident.

It went like this.

Coulson wasn’t dead - surprise! - and in the wake of SHIELD falling, literally because Steve and Nat and new guy Sam  _ made the Triskelion fall _ , Coulson stepped up his efforts to establish Shadow SHIELD (Natasha’s only 65% bitter name for it) as the new spy/intelligence network to deal with all things fucked-up and weird.

While all of that shit went down - again, literally - Clint had been in the assfuck of nowhere, embedded in a smuggling ring that was hauling drugs, humans and leftover Chitauri weapons all over the world. Which meant one night he was drinking with a bunch of fucking assholes who he wanted to kill but had no idea who he was, and woke up the next morning to a bunch of fucking assholes kicking the shit out of him because they suddenly knew  _ exactly _ who he was.

So. That was fun while it lasted.

By the time Clint made it back stateside, he was mostly whole, Natasha had gone to ground, Steve and new guy Sam were chasing the ghost of a ghost all over the world… and Clint didn’t know what was up or what was down anymore. Again.

Coulson found him in Bed-Stuy, where Clint had been keeping himself busy by getting his ass kicked by some kind of tracksuit mafia before and after he stole their dog and their apartment building. 

Clint didn’t drink much, not anymore, not in years - not since that one fuck-awful binge he went on after Coulson and Loki and Clint’s best efforts to roll out the red carpet for an alien invasion. Said binge resulted in hallucinatory dreams so vivid, so cold and so  _ blue _ , that Clint hadn’t even approached being buzzed since then. 

Still, his very first assumption, when he woke up and found Coulson sitting on the couch downstairs with Lucky’s head in his lap and a full pot of coffee still warm in the kitchen, was that he was drunk off his ass and having one fucked-up nightmare.

But Coulson was real, was  _ alive _ , and he had a job for Clint.

A job that Natasha had turned down, Clint found out later, by actually laughing in Coulson’s face and tossing her hair and walking away.

A job that Hill had also turned down, with less laughter and more swagger and probably more judgemental eyebrows. Then again, maybe not. Both women were disturbingly competent in conveying their utterly devastatingly low opinions of others with just an arched eyebrow.

But Clint hadn’t known that at the time. Still, even if he had, Clint wasn’t…

He probably still would have said yes.

Natasha was the kind of person who embraced free will and, once burned twice, decided she sure as hell wasn’t going to be burned three times.

Hill was the kind of person who appreciated logic and power and saw the writing on the wall - Coulson wasn’t Fury and Shadow SHIELD wasn’t SHIELD.

But Clint…

Hell, maybe he just liked getting burned. Because it kind of felt like that was all that ever happened to him.

And absolutely no one had ever accused him of being logical.

So, when Coulson scritched behind Lucky’s ears and said he had a time-sensitive operation in Berlin and needed Clint’s help - Clint packed his shit and got on a plane and went to Berlin.

But then things got fun.

Coulson’s briefing, if Clint was stupidly generous enough to call it that, consisted of this: pack your stuff, go to Berlin, find a woman named Anja and follow her directions, and to bring back ‘the stone’ in one piece.

Clint had done more on less, sure, but…

But Coulson had been  _ dead, _ and it had been Clint’s fault, and everyone was in the air and Clint…

Clint packed his shit and got on a plane and went to Berlin and spent three days tracking down Anja and then got stabbed by her despite his attempts to come off as nonthreatening as possible.

Anja cleaned him up, even did him the solid of stitching up the cut she’d given him while she gave him detailed instructions for his mission.

Apparently, some kind of mystical alien stone had been built into the Berlin Wall. The one that had been wrecked to shit twenty-plus years ago. Which Clint pointed out.

It earned him a look from Anja that said something like  _ this is the best they could send me? _

So she led him to her attic and unlocked about a dozen locks on a steamer trunk and opened it to reveal some kind of machine.

Some kind of  _ time travel machine _ .

And she made him change his clothes and gave him new ID papers and then shipped his ass off to November 2nd, 1989. He was told to be in the  _ exact same place that he arrived _ on November 10th. He was told that if he fucked up, he’d be stuck in the past and the entire course of human history would be irrevocably altered.

Which kind of made Clint wonder… If he hadn’t been around for Loki to fuck with, would things have gone better or worse?

It was a question he had plenty of time to mull over, because there was no way he could actually grab the stone until November 9th - when the whole ‘wall getting smashed’ thing started. So he had a week to do recon, to find out where the fuck the stone was - Anja had some ideas - and to enjoy Berlin at the end of the ‘80s.

And, well, the thing was.

Clint was.

He was lonely.

He was always lonely, and that was just, standard operating procedure, or something.

But.

But this was different.

Because he wasn’t just in a world where all of his… friends? Were off doing their own version of the right thing, while Clint wallowed in all the shit he’d done. He was in a world where Tony Stark was a  _ kid _ and Steve Rogers was still frozen and Bruce was working on his first degree and Natasha was still with the Red Room and Coulson was out there somewhere as a field agent and Fury was just settling in at SHIELD and….

And Clint was alone.

Until some hot as all-fuck German guy sidled up to him at a club one night, ordered Clint a vodka and one for himself without asking, and twenty minutes later, Clint was in an alley getting his dick sucked by Jakob, who had eyes bluer and  _ warmer _ than anything Clint had ever seen and rimmed in kohl and hair styled into some kind of mohawk thing that Clint was afraid to mess up.

After swallowing down Clint’s come - and  _ fuck _ , how long had it been since Clint had had an orgasm that good? - Jakob manhandled Clint into facing the wall and gave him a fucking rim job that had Clint wishing he was ten years younger.

Jakob got him wet enough and loose enough and desperate enough that Clint didn’t even think the guy would need lube, but Jakob pulled out some vaseline - or some kind of German equivalent - and a condom and applied both before fucking into Clint slowly and surely, and it was.

Fucking amazing.

He got Clint off again, jacking Clint with a calloused hand and fucking him at just the right angle until Clint was whining and shuddering and  _ begging _ .

Jakob kissed Clint’s neck, open-mouthed and sloppy and  _ gentle _ after he pulled out, and then he walked away before Clint even had the chance to pull up his pants or collect his goddamn brain enough to thank him.

And then it was November 9th and people were going crazy, shouting and drinking and taking hammers and pry bars and  _ everything _ to the wall, and Clint was damn lucky that the stone was situated in a part of the wall that wasn’t conducive to a large crowd gathering to smash shit.

But Clint’s luck ended there.

There wasn’t a crowd - but there was a guy.

A guy with shoulder-length dark hair pulled into a tail at the base of his neck, black tactical clothes that fit him like some kind of sexy, lethal glove, a mask over the bottom part of his face, and a  _ metal fucking arm _ .

The guy shot Clint, and told him, in dull, flat English, to stay down.

When Clint got up, the guy shot him again - this time in the leg instead of the shoulder.

So Clint lay on the damn street, bleeding all over the fucking place, while the guy pried  _ the stone _ out of the fucking wall.

He sauntered over to Clint, ripped Clint’s own clothes enough to make a tourniquet for his leg, and smoothed sweat and hair and dirt and blood off Clint’s face.

“Try not to die,” he said.

And it was Jakob, with the warm blue eyes and the amazing mouth and fantastic dick and  _ a metal fucking arm. _

He walked away, leaving Clint alone, and that was that.

-o-

Clint made it to the rendevous the next day, even though a… too-fucking-large part of him didn’t want to.

He confessed his failure to Anja, who regarded him with a tight expression and then took care of his injuries before telling him to get his shit and get on a plane and go back to New York.

In a not-at-all-surprising turn of events, Coulson was disappointed, and he didn’t approach Clint for any more work.

Which meant Clint sat around and twiddled his thumbs and dug through all of the now  _ public fucking domain _ SHIELD files for intel on a ‘Jakob’ and ‘metal fucking arm’.

He didn’t find anything.

But then Tony called him to ask for his help on a ‘fun little vacay to Sokovia to get Loki’s pogo stick back’, and that… that led to some real shit going down.

Which led to more shit.

Which led to… Steve showing up at Avengers Tower one day with a sexy as fuck guy with a  _ metal fucking arm _ that he called Bucky. The guy, not the arm.

So. That was a thing.

Bucky. Bucky who Clint had met when he was going by Jakob and was an agent of HYDRA and had shot Clint twice and, well, he’d got him off twice too so… maybe that equalled out, all things considered.

And wow. Even Clint was self-aware enough to realize that  _ that _ was fucked-up logic.

Still, it meant that Clint… Clint had a mess of complicated feelings that squeezed his gut every time he saw Bucky, every time Steve talked about Bucky, every time Clint thought about Bucky.

For five months, they didn’t say a word to each other. Mostly because Clint ran the fuck away whenever the Avengers weren’t on a mission.

But then there inevitably came a mission where Clint was too injured to just walk it off, and he woke up in the Tower’s medical wing, in a cozy as all-hell hospital bed, dry-mouthed and achy, and found Bucky sitting vigil at his bedside.

For a long moment, they just stared at each other.

“You’re really bad at staying down,” Bucky said after what felt like a lifetime of Clint staring into his warm blue eyes.

The words hit Clint hard, made him feel vulnerable and awful in a way that actually getting shot never did.

“You remember me?”

Bucky raised an eyebrow.

“Is it possible to forget you?” he countered.

Clint really loved hearing Bucky talk, and even though it hadn’t been to  _ him _ , these last five months, it had been… fucking awesome to hear the gravel of Bucky’s voice, the inflection in his tone that indicated sarcasm or disbelief or, rarely, humor. He didn’t sound anything like Jakob. Nothing dull or flat about him.

“Actually…” Bucky shifted in his seat, stretched his legs out, plucked at a thread on his sleeve, looked anywhere but at Clint. “Actually, they tried to make me forget you. I kept… I kept going back to Berlin, for maybe eight years. Whenever I finished a mission, I’d just go there, and I didn’t- I didn’t even realize why, what I was looking for -  _ who _ I was looking for. Until Steve brought me here. Until I saw you again. But I-” Bucky shook his head, licked his lips.

That was…

A lot.

And Clint didn’t know what the fuck he was supposed to do with all of that. Didn’t know why in the actual hell Bucky would ever  _ tell him those things. _

“I’m sorry,” Clint said, because he had to say something, and he sure as hell felt sorry.

Bucky glared at him, eyebrows drawing together, full lips pinching into a frown, warm eyes turning kind of blazing.

But he didn’t say anything, and Clint figured he was off the hook. Hoped someone came by soon and drugged him up enough that he could pretend none of this had ever happened.

Bucky shifted again, actually rose to his feet, and Clint silently said goodbye.

Then Bucky stepped to the edge of the bed and leaned down, got into Clint’s personal space and forced Clint’s gaze to meet him. Cupped Clint’s face with his metal hand and smoothed his thumb over the stubble on Clint’s jaw.

“As soon as medical clears you and you shower, I’m taking you out on a date and I’m gonna spend the whole night makin’ you blush and stare at me like you did back then. And then I’m gonna take you home and I’m gonna fuck you in a bed, and in the morning, I’m gonna make you breakfast and then we’re gonna spend the whole day fucking ,and you’re not going to apologize to me for anything.”

Clint had never, not once, not even from  _ Bobbi _ , had that kind of invitation. Order? 

“Uh. Do I… get a vote in this?”

Bucky’s thumb stilled, his whole body did, and Clint wanted to stop breathing so he never said something so fucking stupid again.

“You always get a vote, sweetheart,” Bucky said. “You in or out?”

He made it sound simple.

Made it sound  _ easy _ .

Then again, if anyone understood just how fucking complicated and tangled and  _ fucked _ life was, it was probably Bucky Barnes.

So if he thought this was easy? Was simple?

“In. I’m in.”

Bucky grinned, leaned down and pressed a chaste, barely there kiss to Clint’s mouth.

“Good.”

-o-

  
  



End file.
